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		<title>I need to learn to keep backup copies of everything. &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/08-August/19.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>I need to learn to keep backup copies of everything.</h1>
			<p>Day 00531: Friday, 2016 August 19</p>
		</header>
<p>
	I&apos;ve been storing my weblog entries on a <abbr title="Universal Serial Bus">USB</abbr> drive due to the fact that I thought that <a href="/en/domains/newdawn.local.xhtml"><code>//newdawn.local.</code></a>&apos;s power jack was failing.
	I figured that when the machine eventually kicked the bucket, which would probably be soon, I didn&apos;t want to be trapped away from my journal during the period of time between then and when I found a way to access the data on the still-working hard drive.
	Furthermore, because of the broken state of my journal (most of last month&apos;s entries are merely notes and need to be constructed into actual paragraphs; a few of this month&apos;s entries are like that too), I haven&apos;t been making Git commits and uploading what I have to the two online repositories that act as backup copies of this journal.
	Bad idea.
	I should have learned from <a href="/en/weblog/2015/03-March/07.xhtml">the incident</a> to keep backup copies at all times.
	I never formatted this particular <abbr title="Universal Serial Bus">USB</abbr> drive, so it was still using the <abbr title="File Allocation Table">FAT</abbr> file system, which is prone to breaking.
	It did break late last night, taking all of my journal entries that were stored there with it.
	Between what was still saved on my hard drive and what was still open in my <a href="apt:geany">text editor</a>, I was able to salvage all but two entries: <a href="/en/weblog/2016/08-August/18.xhtml">yesterday</a>&apos;s and the one from <a href="/en/weblog/2016/08-August/12.xhtml">2016-08-12</a>.
	Yesterday&apos;s was a short entry with not much to it, so it was easy to reconstruct, but the entry from 2016-08-12 was harder.
	I had to use clues from the days around it to even figure out what day that was, then attempt to remember everything that happened.
	I&apos;m pretty sure that I&apos;ve left some things out this time.
</p>
<p>
	I tried to use <a href="apt:testdisk">testdisk</a> copy the files from the damaged partition, but it couldn&apos;t even find them.
	Next, I tried to have testdisk repair the boot sector, hoping that that would restore access to the data, but that didn&apos;t work either.
	Instead, it seems to have completely deleted all the data on thee partition, so now even testdisk can&apos;t see anything there.
	The data is now lost for good.
	I swear, I need to get better about keeping backup copies.
</p>
<p>
	I received a letter from someone saying that they want me to join their new startup, a development team creating mobile applications.
	I haven&apos;t managed to get my mobile application development environment working, but maybe I could get help with that.
	More importantly though, I refuse to develop proprietary code.
	I wrote back to tell them that I was interested, but only if access to the source code is available to everyone.
	I&apos;m not sure if they&apos;ll write back, but if they do, we&apos;ll see if the new startup has any intention of working on free code.
	Someone else wrote asking me to sell them my domain.
	This is the second person that&apos;s asked for it! I explained that it isn&apos;t for sale, but that if they&apos;re looking for a short domain, perhaps my notes on <a href="https://y.st./en/URI_research/ccTLDs.xhtml"><abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr>s</a> would be of use.
</p>
<p>
	<a href="http://www.uopeople.edu/">University of the People</a> had now enrolled me in my first two courses.
	They&apos;ve sent me my password in that same email though.
	This is the second time that they&apos;ve done that.
	Clearly, University of the People does not properly hash their passwords, and is instead storing them as cleartext.
	Add that to the fact that their website doesn&apos;t use <abbr title="Transport Layer Security">TLS</abbr> and you see that this isn&apos;t really the most secure place.
	Thankfully, I use a different password for each and every website, so a breach of security at the university won&apos;t compromise my everything, but the least that they could do is to stop sending my password out via unencrypted email where any eavesdroppers can read it.
</p>
<p>
	My old domain registrar wrote back, again trying to claim that security is their top priority.
	Once again, I made it clear that continuing to charge a card that the card holder has made clear that they don&apos;t want charged is <strong>*not*</strong> security.
	To illustrate this, I brought up a scenario.
	What if I&apos;d used someone else&apos;s credit card to set up automatic renewals without their permission? As the card holder and the domain holder are not the same person, the card holder would have no access to the account and be unable to prove that they are the domain holder, be case they wouldn&apos;t be.
	In this case, the card holder would have no remedy through the domain registrar, and the registrar would refuse to stop charging their card.
	In what way is that secure?
</p>
<p>
	The compass on the GT-i9300 that was stolen from me didn&apos;t function correctly.
	I assumed that this was a limitation of Replicant.
	However, while I was reading about Replicant on the GT-i9100, I found <a href="https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GalaxyS2I9100CompassCalibration">compass calibration instructions</a> for the latter! As it turns out, the <a href="https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GalaxyS3I9300CompassCalibration">GT-i9300 compass also needs to be calibrated</a>.
	Now that I know that, I should have a working compass on my new GT-i9100.
</p>
<p>
	My mother and I spent much of the day yard saling.
	Near the end, they started talking about getting a low-paying unspecialized job because schools don&apos;t seem to be hiring them.
	That&apos;s really got to be an insult to their pride.
	I&apos;m not sure what I can do though, if anything.
</p>
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